Hangin' with the houseboyz.

• Author: Buckley, Christopher
• Position: Congressional staffers

Think the guys you elected are dangerous? Meet the arrogant young staffers running the show . . .

Pity the book(*1) that comes out in May 1992 with the subtitle Blowing the Lid Off Congress. Does any Congress with a national approval rating of 17 percent and up to its neck in a check-kiting scandal have a lid left over its head? Squalid and appalling as Jackley's revelations are, this deft account of the grosser realities in democracy's sausage works, based on the author's 12 years as a congressional staffer, or "Hill rat" as they call themselves, may no longer have the ability to dismay. The collective voice being raised these days is that of Casablanca's Captain Renaud, shocked--shocked!--to learn that congressmen are perkmongers and slobs when it comes to balancing their own checkbooks, never mind that they've overdrawn the nation's by $4 trillion in the last 12 years. The more's the pity, because this is an important book deserving a wide audience.

Touted as the Liar's Poker of Capitol Hill, Jackley's account does live up to the publisher's flackery. It entertains as it damns. The author grew up as a Special Forces brat, which equipped him, at least at first, with the temperament and moxie to take his hill. His eventual A-Funny-Thing-Happened-On-The-Way-To-Damascus moment came when his second child nearly died in infancy. The experience concentrated his mind. Suddenly his mighty press secretarial labors on behalf of his boss, Texas Democratic Congressman Ronald Coleman, a man with the ethics and moral courage of a hookworm--and apologies to hookworms everywhere--fell into the proper perspective. And thus he came to burn his bridges with a vengeance.

Like the mini-masters of the universe portrayed by Michael Lewis in his staff-level expose of Salomon Brothers, the Hill rats Jackley chronicles learn self-importance at a very callow age, usually right out of college. At one point, Jackley explains to a fellow Appropriations Committee rat that the title of Lewis' book derived from Salomon big-wig John Gutfreund's dare to a colleague to play a single hand of the game for a million dollars. The staffer snorts, "A mil? One lousy mil? I can do ten mil with report language and not even have to ask the chairman." Jackley notes, "That may or may not have been true, but his disdain was palpable." He quotes another rodent: "Lord Acton was only half right. Power might corrupt, but absolute power is a blast."

Up on the Hill, quotations from classical antiquity are just palimpsests for graffiti. Parliamentarian Edmund Burke's lofty admonition to the electorate in 1774...